The Thinks and the Feels: Kennedy Ryan's LONG SHOT

(Content Warning: discussion of domestic violence and rape)

On the eve of the NCAA basketball National Championship, star college baller August West is sitting in a bar, reluctant to return to his hotel room. It's not only the eve of his biggest game ever; it's also the eve of the birth of his father, a former NBA player who died fifteen years earlier, and he's restless and jittery. But after his high school coach, whom he was supposed to be meeting, has an unexpected emergency, West reconciles himself to an early evening.

Until he hears the young woman cussing like a sailor at the basketball game on the television at the other end of the bar.

Said woman's knowledge of basketball is almost as impressive as her colorful language, and West feels an immediate connection. Not because she plays up to him—in fact, she's initially pretty dismissive—but because he discovers that she, like he, is biracial. When he asks her where's she's from, the woman explains about her New Orleans Creole stock on her mother's side, and her German and Irish on father's: "I'm a mix of everything the bayou could come up with... So my cousin says I had more ingredients than gumbo," (Kindle Loc 231). Though West's mother is the white parent, his father the black, West and "Gumbo" share the same experience of feeling like a racial outsider. "Did you ever feel like you didn't quite fit anywhere? I mean, like you were always kind of in between?" Gumbo asks him, which causes West to think "I may not look a lot like my African-American father, but I look nothing like anyone in the family I have left. Most kids were one thing or the other and clumped together based on that. It left me sometimes feeling adrift" (245).

West and Gumbo (her actual name is Iris) get so caught up in their conversation that they end up shutting down the bar. But when West goes in for a kiss at the end of the night, Iris call a halt. To West's everlasting regret, she's already got a boyfriend.

After this opening meet-bittersweet, a reader is expecting that the aforementioned boyfriend is not long for Iris's arms. And that the resultant romance will focus on two people connecting over their mutual biracial identities and experiences.

But said reader would be mistaken. For Ryan's story is less traditional romance and more women's fiction, a journey that the author hints at in the Author's Note that prefaces the novel:

I started writing this book two years ago out of righteous indignation on behalf of a young woman whose journey I didn't understand. I write when I have something to say, and I knew I couldn't say it from a place of judgment and hypotheticals. So I started talking with women who had walked that path.

Ryan writes in abstractions here, but one can't really write a review of her novel without being more specific. For the "path" that she refers to is the path into and out of an abusive romantic relationship. The "place of judgment" Ryan mentions is likely the judgment that many who have not experienced such a relationship first-hand tend to make about not the abuser, but the person being abused. Why didn't they leave? Why did they take it when the verbal abuse started pouring out of a love one's mouth? Why did they stay when the fists started flying? They just must be weak, or must want to be abused, right?

But the Iris we meet along with August is not weak in the least. As August observes, "A lot of girls just reflect. They figure out what you like so they can get in with a baller. This one has her own views, stands her own ground and doesn't five a damn if I like it. I like it" (224). And when we get inside Iris's head, we discover that her main goal in life is to not end up relying on a man, as her mother has for most of her life. She and her cousin have "always been afraid of ending up like our mothers—depending on a man for everything, taking his scraps" (908).

Iris DuPree's relationship with Caleb Bradley isn't about taking his scraps—at least at first. Despite being an economically privileged white college boy, Caleb spent time and effort to woo the reluctant Iris, and they've been dating for almost a year. But readers with any knowledge of how abusers operate is likely to pick up on the clues Ryan drops that Caleb is not as great a guy as he seems. He prefers Iris to wear her hair a certain way, gives her clothes that he wants her to wear, and is prone to angry outbursts on the basketball court when things don't go his way. And he's definitely not excited about Iris's post-college career plans, plans that will likely take her away from him.

Entitled Caleb proves to be a master manipulator, and Iris, despite her reservations, ends up living with her boyfriend soon after Caleb enters the NBA. And since West has also been drafted, Iris and West's paths end up crossing and recrossing, brief conversations with West serving as welcome respite for Iris from an increasingly tension-filled relationship with Caleb.

A relationship that, by the end of Caleb's first professional season, turns verbally and physically abusive. But a relationship that Iris can't find her way out of, at least at first. Ryan does not shy away from depicting the violence that Iris experiences at Caleb's hands; there are multiple scenes of both assault and rape on the page. Such depictions are likely to be deeply triggering for many readers. And for readers who are immersed in rape culture (as are we all), it can be difficult to read such scenes as solely violent when rape has so often been presented as an erotic experience in popular culture. Not at all what the author intended, I'd guess, but still, hard to escape.

Why then did Ryan choose to include such scenes? What purpose do they serve? Is is possible to tell the story of domestic abuse without showing on the page the violence that lies at its heart? Is it empowering or disempowering for those who have been abused to see similar abuse depicted directly, rawly, without a veil? What about for those who have not experienced such abuse themselves? Does seeing such violence depicted on the page make those who haven't been victims more sympathetic toward those who have? I don't think there are any easy "yes" or "no" answers to such questions; each reader will have to decide for themselves whether to pick up Ryan's book knowing that such scenes are included.

What I can say is that I wholeheartedly applaud Ryan's inversion of the racist image of the white woman endangered by overly sexualized black man, an image that has played out over and over in American popular culture since the end of the Civil War (see D. W. Griffiths' 1917 film Birth of a Nation for just one example; see Martha Hodes' White Women, Black Men for a historical corrective). While the majority of sexual assaults in the United States today are intra-racial (victim and perpetrator are of the same race), we cannot say the same about the past; Americans tend to repress and erase the long history of white male rape of enslaved black women during our country's long embrace of slavery. Ryan's choice to make her domestic abuser a white man serves as a pointed reminder of this often forgotten history.

ARREST RATES ACROSS PRO SPORTS TEAMS

Infogram

Through Iris, Ryan also makes pointed comments about the way our current society continues to look away from the violence perpetrated by men against women, especially when those men are in positions of power (professional athletes, rather than plantation owners) and the women they abuse are women of color. Once Iris figures out a way to free herself and her daughter from Caleb, she doesn't choose to press charges against him:

"Other athletes outed as abusers are fined and miss a few games, only to be back on the court, back on the field in a few weeks. I'm not trusting my life, my daughter's life, to a system that favors men just like Caleb. I've seen the so-called consequences we have for domestic abuse, and I need more than that."

What she needs is a guy like West, who throughout the story serves as a vision of hope for what a future with a kind, caring man might be like. But Iris never asks West to rescue her; in fact, she turns to her cousin, and to her great grandmother, not to her potential good guy lover, to help her recover emotionally in the wake of her trauma. West may be the idealized prize at the end of the struggle, but the hard work of recovery is one best undertaken with sympathetic female supporters, Ryan suggests.


Ryan is adept at giving readers the "big feels," a vital skill for any romance writer (see West's swoon-worthy declaration to Iris: "If you were mine, Iris, there would be no doubt what position you'd hold in my life. You'd be center. I'd play you at the five."). But she's also just as good at getting readers to think hard about the big issues, issues that American culture would often prefer we ignore: domestic violence; racial identity; the gendered aspects of privileged and power. It's this combination—big emotions and big ideas—that make Ryan one of the most provocative authors writing romance today.


Photo credits:
Basketball bar: DHGate
Pro sports arrest rates: Vocativ

Kennedy Ryan

Long Shot

A Hoops Novel (#1)

indie-published, 2018

Adjunct to a Media Storm: Yale, Kavanaugh, and reporting sexual misconduct

I've been getting a lot of phone calls from the media the past two weeks. Not, alas, because the press has discovered a sudden interest in romance novels. But because I attended Yale in the 1980s, and lived in the same dorm freshman year as the current nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh. At the time, Yale had about 10,000 students, 5,000 undergrads, 1200 of them first years. With 12 residential colleges (think dorms, but each with its own culture, governance, and community), that meant about 100 freshman were assigned to share the same peer group. Each cohort shared a dorm on Old Campus, the quad where the majority of first years lived.

Lawrance Hall, Old Campus, Yale University

I became good friends with a handful of the 100 who were assigned, like me, to Ezra Stiles College, and who all lived in Old Campus's Lawrance Hall in the fall of 1983 and spring of 1984. I was nodding acquaintances with many of the others. But while I recognize both Kavanaugh's name and photograph today, I never numbered him among either of those two groups back then.

Most of the reporters lose interest after I tell them that I didn't really know Kavanaugh, and wasn't part of his friend group at the time.

Others, though, have been asking more generally what it was like to be at Yale in the mid 80s. "Is this the Yale you remember?" "Did anyone talk to students about sexual harassment?" "Would you have known how to report it if something like that happened to you?" "Did the sexual misbehavior at the party that purportedly happened one entryway over from yours in Lawrance Hall seem probable? Likely?"

All these questions have got me thinking a lot about those early college days. And talking to a lot of my college friends about what it was like then, and how things are different (or the same) now. Especially when it comes to issues of gender.

There is a huge difference between how Yale dealt with rape and sexual harassment and misbehavior then, and how it does now. Date rape, or acquaintance rape, was a relatively new concept in the public consciousness when we arrived on campus in September of 1983. My spouse (who is also Stiles '87) remembered reading an article about the concept in the Yale Daily News sometime during our first or second year. His memory set me off on a search of the YDN archives, which turned up this article, the first of a two-part series, in the February 28, 1984 edition: "Victims talk about acquaintance rape." The article opens with these disturbing words:

     There are no full statistics available on rape between students at Yale anywhere—not at University Health Services (UHS), not with the Yale Police, and not in the Yale Dean's office. There is no mention of rape in the 1983-84 Undergraduate Regulations. There is no procedure for a victim to file a formal complaint of rape with the University.
     But there is rape between students at Yale. (page 1)

If there were no procedures for reporting rape, there were certainly no procedures for reporting sexual harassment or sexual misconduct of the type Deborah Ramirez asserts she experienced at the hands of several Yale men in Lawrence Hall.

To the best of my memory, no one told any of us during our early days on campus what to do if someone sexually assaulted us.

Many of us female undergrads had been raised in homes or in cultures where the idea of harassment or assault was never broached, either. Or, if it was, it was framed as the girl's/woman's fault. As the director of the Rape Crisis Services at the New Haven YWCA reports in the YDN article, "When a rape is committed by an acquaintance, it is sometimes difficult for the victim to convince others as well as herself that it was a rape."

I don't think it likely that an incident such as the one Deborah Ramirez describes would have been "the talk of the campus," as Kavanaugh recently opined in an interview with FOX News. And even if it had, who would have known what to do about it?

Nor does it seem at all surprising that Ramirez would not have talked about the incident she describes occurring with anyone else, friends or people in authority. The YDN article features the stories of two Yale women who talked about being raped by fellow students, mentioning that one made a formal complaint about the incident to the Yale College Executive Board, "which is comprised of Yale students, faculty, and professors" and which "hears complaints ranging from library offenses to assault and coercion" (3). Part two of the article, in the 2/29/84 edition, describes the adjudication of that case. "Donald" (names were changed in the article), the alleged rapist, was determined to be guilty by the Board; "as punishment, they banned him from living on campus and participating in any college ceremonies, including graduation, and suspended his diploma for six months." Allison asked that "Donald" be forced to attend counseling sessions, but the Board had no authority to order such a thing.

And at Commencement later that spring, Allison saw Donald receiving his diploma. When she contacted the Yale Dean's Office, she was told that "Donald" had later appealed the Board's decision, claiming that "since one member of the Executive Committee had been assaulted in the past, this had biased that Committee member and the Committee, against him," "Allison" was told. Because of this, "Donald's" punishment was lifted.

No one informed Allison of either of Donald's appeal, or its result.

The article ends with a call for Yale to make "a greater effort to deal with the problem of rape between students" (3): first, acknowledging that it happens; second, setting up a special Committee to address the issue; and third, that they inform students of how to report such acts.

Is it any wonder in such an environment that a young college woman would not report a less severe act of sexual misconduct?




For those of you who attended college in the 1980s, do you remember if/what you were told during your first year orientation about sexual harassment and assault? Did your college have a procedure in place to report rape? Sexual misconduct and/or harassment? When did it institute one?

And what is the earliest romance novel you can remember that deals with sexual harassment/misbehavior in a college setting?

Photo credits:
Lawrance Hall: Wikiwand
"Considering Seeking Help": Yale SHARE

Negotiating the Gender Politics of Military Life: Lauren Gallagher's RAZOR WIRE

It seems almost impossible to imagine that fewer than four years lie between the repeal of the American military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and the U. S. Supreme Court's decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Until September 20th of 2011, gays and lesbians who disclosed their sexual orientations could be discharged from service for creating "an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order, and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability" (10 U. S. C.  654(b)). But by June 26, 2015, gay personnel were not only free to talk about their sexual partners, they were also guaranteed the right to marry them.

Given the short span of time the American military has had to adjust to such a head-spinning change, it should be no surprise that military culture does not often provide support to or even tolerance of its homosexual members. Particularly if those members are women. Just by being women, lesbians challenge the traditionally male-centric culture of the military. And by refusing to desire the men who embrace that male-centric culture, lesbians in the services are doubly "tainted." As naval police officer Kim Lockhoff explains to her partner about her former posting:

"I was . . . I didn't party with the guys, that's for sure. I pretty much kept my head down. When a guy came on to me, I tried to be polite about not being interested, but somehow that got turned into me being a cold fish . . . . One of the guys spent half the Naval Ball hitting on me. When I turned him down for the hundredth time that night, he went and told the others he couldn't get through the razor wire in Lockhoff's pants." She laughed bitterly. "And the [nick]name stuck" (58).

To Kim, "Razor Wire" is more than just a disrespectful moniker. It's a potential threat: "A few times, I overheard guys in my command saying I just needed a dick to pound some sense into me so I'd stop being such a bitch" (59). And so when she is posted to Okinawa, Kim decides to present herself entirely differently, a friendly, hard-drinking party girl. But this self-presentation doesn't mitigate the problem:

"I tried to be what I thought they wanted girls in the Navy to be, and . . . It's like, now that they think I'm a slut, they're offended as hell if I reject them. All the guys at my last command thought I was a bitch for shutting them all out. All the guys here think I'm a bitch because they think I'm sleeping with everyone but them" (61).

Given Kim's reputation as a "whore," it's little wonder that she's more than a little reluctant to report a sexual assault she experienced. Add the fact that her attacker is a respected superior officer, and reluctance turns to outright rejection.

Readers might expect that a fellow woman serving in the naval police might have more sympathy. But when Kim turns to Reese Marion for advice, she's hurt, but not all that surprised, to find that culture trumps gender. Reese has already formed an opinion about Kim Lockhoff, and it's not a flattering one:

Alejandro always thought it was entertaining as hell, watching me straighten out girls who had no business in the Navy, never mind as cops. Especially when the girl in question was a vapid twit like MA3 Lockhoff. The kind who used her pretty little smile and her petty not-so-little tits to bend every man on the island to her cute little will. MA3 Lockhoff was one of the reasons we got emails before every formal event reminding the female service members to please not dress like whores this time. Women like her drove me insane, and Alejandro lived to watch them do it. (10)

As Reese has learned over her years in the navy, "fitting in with these guys was the safest approach. If they're being crass, be crasser. If they're drunk, get drunker. If they think a girl's a slut, declare her a whore with a pussy like a wizard's sleeve" (45). Even if you're nauseated by the sexist motto espoused by many of those same guys, that "you can't rape the willing," it's almost impossible not to let the assumptions behind it infiltrate into your own unconsciousness, to automatically assume that any woman who makes an accusation of rape must be lying.

Even, horrifyingly, when you've experienced sexual assault yourself.

Only when Reece forces herself to step back from her own preconceived judgments, and truly listen to what Kim has to say, can the two women take the first tentative steps toward friendship. And then toward something even stronger. . .

A former high school teacher of mine often argued that you "can't legislate morality," a contention I frequently challenged with no little vehemence. As the Supreme Court's decision this June shows, you can legislate morality. Culture, though, may take a little more time to catch up.

Photo credits:

Master-at-Arms t-shirt: Cafe Press

Navvies kissing: The Virginia Pilot online

Lauren Gallagher

Razor Wire

Riptide, 2014

Rape Culture and Rape Fantasy: Lilah Pace's ASKING FOR IT

Do we live in a culture that normalizes rape? Tacitly encourages it?

If so, do romance novels play a role in perpetuating such a culture?

Do women who have sexual fantasies about being raped feel ashamed of such fantasies? Feel like bad feminists?

Would a woman who lived in a non-rape culture never fantasize about being raped?


These and other questions have been swirling around in my head after reading Liz McCausland's June 13, 2015 "Unpopular Opinion" post on her blog, Something More: my extensive reading, which discusses the questions we are not asking about our romance novels when it comes to the issue of rape. And after reading an article in the July/August 2015 edition of the Yale Alumni Magazine, in which four women, including two current Yale students, hold a conversation about issues of sexual misconduct on campus. And especially after reading Lilah Pace's controversial erotic romance, Asking For It, which explores the issue of rape fantasy while simultaneously presenting eroticized scenes of consensual rape for its readers' pleasure.

Pace's novel, told from the point of view of Vivienne, a white New Orleans girl of privilege who has moved to Austin, Texas, to attend the University of Texas and earn a Ph.D. in art. Vivienne is in therapy, in part because of the guilt and shame she feels about her sexual fantasies: "I don't get off unless I'm imagining being raped.... I hate this about myself" (page 2). She hates it, but even so, she wishes she could move from fantasy to reality, not by being attacked (been there, done that), but by sharing her fantasy with a willing partner in a sexual role-play. Unfortunately, her last boyfriend, nice-guy lawyer Geordie, was not at all comfortable playing such a sexual role, even in play, and because of this, as well as other incompatibilities, the two broke up.

One part of Vivienne is sickened by her obsession with rape fantasy. Another takes deep pleasure in indulging in it, even when the lines between reality and fantasy get blurry. A flat tire on a dark, lonely road; a cell phone with no charge; a large, overpowering male stepping out of his sleek car to help—when Vivienne finds herself in the midst of this real-life scenario at the start of Asking For It, her mind soon fills

...with visions I didn't want to want. Visions of him bending me over the back of my car, pushing up the skirt of my sundress. Of him pulling me into the backseat, putting my hand on his cock, whispering, Time to thank me. His hands fisting in my hair as he towed me down on my knees—
     Stop it. (8)

Good Samaritan does not turn into actual rapist, and the two part without even exchanging names. But only a few days later, at a friend's party, Vivienne finds herself being introduced to unsmiling Jonah Marks, UT Earth Sciences professor, and the sexy object of her latest guilty fantasies. Even worse, former boyfriend Geordie is also in attendance, and is headed toward sloppy, confessional drunk territory. When Geordie attempts to apologize for his role in their breakup in excruciatingly embarrassing detail—"I mean, kink yay, right? Everybody should love kinks. And you get to have yours! You do. But it's not my kink. At all. Playing rapist freaks me out. But I shouldn't have been such a dumb cunt about it" (25)—Vivenne can't bring herself to just laugh and forget it. And neither can Jonah, who overhears Geordie's confession. And who makes Vivienne a proposal that tells her that he, too, was as far from envisioning himself as a Good Samaritan as it was possible to be:

     "I don't even know you."
     "That's going to make it better for you," Jonah says. "With a boyfriend, you can pretend—but it's a joke, really. A game. Not the fantasy you really want. Me? I'm nearly a stranger. I can do more than fuck you. I can scare you a little. Just a little. Enough to make it what you really want.
.....
     "It's your fantasy, and mine. Chances like this don't come along often—two people twisted in the exact same way." Jonah smiles; it's a fierce expression, rather than a friendly one. "If we don't make something out of this, I think you'll regret it. I know I will." (29)

Unsurprisingly, the rational, thinking part of Vivienne is appalled by Jonah's proposal:

My fantasy is something I'm trying to escape from, not sink down into. If I try this and hate it, that would be beyond horrible. It might be as traumatic as a real rape, and I would have walked right into it. That's not what scares me, though. What scares me is that I'll try it and love it. Maybe I really am that fucked up. (30)

Yet her own obsession calls to her, and only a few days later, she finds herself emailing Jonah, asking him to meet. And then asking him for more.

Several consensual forced sexual encounters later, and Vivienne and Jonah know they're explosive together as lovers. And so do readers; these scenes are detailed, explicit, and meant to be a turn-on, not a sign of Vivienne's "fucked up" mind. And they were so, at least to this reader, even though rape fantasy isn't really something that pops to the front of my brain when I'm imagining sexy times. I've never been sexually assaulted myself, but I have friends, acquaintances, and relatives who have, and I find the idea of eroticizing sexual violence against women in the face of that knowledge pretty distasteful. But Pace's story turned me on. Why?

I think that it's because that, despite all the pre-publication talk about the blurring of the boundaries between fantasy and reality, there is a clear line between rape and role-play, both for Vivienne and for the reader. Vivienne and Jonah discussed their hard and soft boundaries, as occurs in many BDSM romance novels, before their first encounter, and all of the sites of their trysts, as well as the general outlines of the fantasy each one will involve, are agreed upon by both parties before each occurence. Vivienne is sickened by her actual rapist, who is still involved in her life to a small degree, but she is turned on by the pretense of being forced. Reading Vivienne's story felt far different to me than reading Old Skool rape-tastic romance, in which rape occurs but is rarely named such in the texts. In Old Skool romances, a reader has to turn a narrative of actual rape into a fantasy inside her own head. In contrast, what Vivienne and Jonah are doing is meant to simulate rape, rather than rape pretending to be something more benign as in Old Skool romances. The fantasy takes place on the pages of the book, in the head of the protagonist, rather than in my own. I'm not pretending that rape is a pleasure; Vivienne is, and it turns her on. That difference may not seem to be a major one, but for me, it was the difference between a book that makes me want to throw up and a book that I find both intellectually intriguing and sexually pleasurable.

And it's also because Vivienne has the advice of a kindly, intelligent, and insightful therapist to guide her through her unusual sexual journey. Doreen, said therapist, reassures Vivienne that experiencing rape fantasies in the wake of being sexually assaulted, while uncommon, is not unheard of. After her first encounter with Jonah, Vivienne fears that Doreen will judge her negatively for turning her fantasies into reality/play (projecting much?), and will advise Vivienne for her own mental health against doing it again. But Doreen, like the best of therapists, refuses to judge; instead, she assures Vivienne that "there's a world of difference between your fantasies and what [X] did, because he raped you.... You choose your partner in the fantasy—whether that's a figment of your imagination or a willing lover like Jonah. You didn't choose [X]. He took that choice away from you" (192). Doreen tries to help Vivienne redirect her focus to what she thinks is Vivienne's real problem:

"One of the reasons you came to me was that you wanted to stop having this fantasy. I understand your reasons. But I don't think the fantasy itself is your most significant problem. I think your main problem is the way you beat yourself up about it.... That, and the reason you're fixated on the fantasy in the first place." (11)

Initially, Vivienne is able to keep her guilt and shame out of her trysts with Jonah. In large part because she and Jonah agree to keep their personal lives out of their sexual play, feeling that this will make the play all the more sexually charged. But such compartmentalization becomes more and more difficult as they encounter each other casually on campus and find themselves feeling empathy for the other's emotions, and when real life, in the form of family problems, interrupts their consensual play. Can a relationship founded on rape fantasy transform into a romantic relationship? How much can Jonah and Vivienne keep hidden from one another (Vivienne's rape and her dysfunctional family; the reasons why Jonah's so drawn to rapist role-play, and his own family troubles) and still hope to build mutual trust?

The most memorable scene in the novel for me was a confrontation of sorts between Vivienne and Doreen, when, after months of building up trust between them, Doreen thinks Vivienne is strong enough to listen to this bombshell: "You might have had this fantasy even if [X] had never raped you" (251). Though Vivienne disagrees—"No." I shake my head. "He did this to me. You know he did," Doreen asks Vivienne to consider thinking about her history in a different way:

     "[X] raped you.... The fantasy comes from that, and from a culture that eroticizes violence against women, and leftover puritanical guilt about sex that tells us we're not allowed to choose it and want it for ourselves, and from God only knows where else."
     I'm furious with her. I want to cry. My cheeks are flushed with shame. Every emotion I've ever felt about this is bubbling up at once. "But it's the only thing that gets me off. I can't come any other way! Does that sound normal to you?"
     Doreen looks at me steadily. "Exactly. The fantasy isn't your problem; it's the extremity of your fixation on it. Who  is it who won't let you find sexual satisfaction any other way?"
     Me. She means me.  (251-52)


Asking For It doesn't provide any easy answers to the questions that opened this post; in fact, with its "To be Continued" ending, it leaves far too many of them frustratingly open. But at least it is asking us to give voice to the questions, to start thinking about the intersections of rape culture and rape fantasy, in romance novels and in real life. A truly feminist move, in my book.

Lilah Pace

Asking for It

Berkley, 2015

Recovering from Rape: Elle Kennedy's THE DEAL

It feels a little weird to cheer a romance with a protagonist who was raped as a teen. Rape surely isn't anything to cheer about. But a romance with a heroine who has been, and is still, refusing to buy into the victim-blaming discourses that so often surround those who have suffered sexual trauma, a heroine who has been taking active steps to claim her own sexual pleasure despite her past assault, seems rare enough to be worth a hurrah or two.

It's not hard to understand why college junior Hannah Wells is not a big partier; at 15, she was raped at a party, and when she tried to prosecute her attacker, she and her family became pariahs in their small town. Hannah's had lots of therapy, and has even had a few boyfriends, since her assault, but she's never been able to reach orgasm during sex with a partner. Justin Kohl, sexy new transfer student, has her heart pounding, though, even though he's a jock, not arty Hannah's usual type. Might he be the one to help her get over her sexual difficulty?

When he signed up for Philosophical Ethics, hockey team captain Garrett Graham thought the course would be a breeze. But this semester, a new, far tougher instructor is teaching it, and after a disastrous midterm, Garrett (and most of the rest of the class) is in danger of failing. Brash, aggressive Garrett will NOT allow that to happen—if he can't get his GPA up, he'll be suspended from the team. And hockey, and his teammates, are the most important thing in his life.

Hearing that fellow classmate Hannah has aced the midterm, Garrett decides that Hannah must and will be his tutor. But unlike most of the girls who fawn over this BMOC, Hannah won't give him the time of day.

Garrett isn't one to take no for an answer, though, and tries several different angles to convince Hannah that it's in her best interests to accept the job he's offering. But Hannah remains firm—why would she ever want to spend her time tutoring a dumb, foul-mouthed, cocky jock? Especially when she has her duet in the Winter Showcase to prepare for. The Showcase isn't just a performance; it's a competition, with the winner granted a major scholarship. With all the money her family had to spend on lawyers during the rape prosecution and trial, Hannah wants more than anything to win the scholarship and relieve some of her parents' financial burdens.

When Hannah's roommate, aware of her crush on Justin, drags her at a party, and Garrett sees how she's drooling over Justin, he comes up with the perfect deal: she'll tutor him for a week and a half, preparing him for the Philosophical Ethics midterm re-do. After the test, Garrett will go out on a very public date with her, thereby raising her social profile up to a level that will attract the status-conscious Justin. Much to Garrett's surprise, and to her own, Hannah takes Garrett up on his challenge.

As Garrett and Hannah spend time together prepping Garrett for his test, their sarcastic dissing of each other gradually leads to something unexpected: friendship. And for Garrett, who is happy to sleep with almost any girl, but has no desire to take on the time-sink of a girlfriend, something even more unexpected happens: not only is he attracted to arty singer Hannah, but he actually might want to spend time with her outside of bed.

It was great to read a romance with a female character who had experienced sexual abuse, but who had already engaged in extensive therapy and who was not allowing shame, guilt, or victim-blaming discourses to undermine her hard work in learning to deal with the aftermath of her trauma. Hannah has learned to be comfortable with her body, can bring herself to climax through masturbation, and knows that she'd like to experience orgasm with another person, if she can only find the person who turns her on enough. That she learns that it's not only her own attraction to a potential partner, but also the attentiveness of that partner to her needs, that allows her to achieve her sexual goals, is a lesson that not only those who have experienced sexual trauma benefit from learning, but that every girl and woman beginning to explore her own sexuality needs to discover.

And it was also great to watch the brash, vulgar Garrett starting to recognize the sexist language and behavior that he and his fellow jocks take for granted in their dealings with the opposite sex. When Garrett's housemate and fellow teammate Logan says about Hannah, "She's hot... You tapping that?" Garrett can't help feeling uncomfortable:

I'm not sure why I'm suddenly on edge. I'm not into Hannah in that way, but the idea of her and Logan hooking up makes me uneasy. Maybe because I know what a slut Logan can be. I can't even count the number of times I've seen a chick do a walk of shame out of his bedroom. (Kindle Loc 1295)

After Hannah reveals her trauma and asks Garrett to help her overcome her sexual problem (thinking it might be easier to focus on her own pleasure, rather than worrying about disappointing her partner by not reaching orgasm, if she's with someone whom she doesn't love), Garrett agrees. But Hannah and Garrett don't jump immediately into fabulous, problem-free sex; despite Garrett's cocky reputation, there's no magic penises here. Garrett actually takes the time to do some research about victims of rape, and refuses to rush straight to intercourse. The two work on establishing mutual trust, and joint experimentation, to find what Hannah responds to sexually, and what triggers can short-circuit her sexual pleasure.

The last quarter of the book, when Hannah and Garrett's friendship-with-benefits is threatened by Hannah's earlier agreement to go out with Justin and by the meddling of Garrett's verbally and physically abusive father, takes a decided turn toward the melodramatic. Rather at odds with the realistic feel of most of the earlier story, and certainly not my usual cup of tea. Yet I was willing to live with the soap-opera-y shift for the rewards of the book's earlier unusual, progressive depiction of a young woman who had been raped, but who, through therapy, self-development, and the cultivation of caring friendships, works to craft an identity that is far more than just "victim."


Photo credits:
Girl with Guitar: Love this pic
Shame Blame: Pinterest Mirah Bradford

Elle Kennedy

The Deal

(Off-Campus Book 1)

Self-published

Sympathy for the Rapist

I have such a strong, visceral memory of when I first read Oscar Hijuelos' 1989 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. In particular, I remember how blown away I was by the sympathy Hijuelos was able to make me feel for a rapist. Cesar Castillo is a man of the 1950s, a womanizer, a misogynist, a man steeped in the machismo of his Cuban roots. His brother dead, his chance at musical fame just a distant memory, he begins a relationship with a devoutly Christian woman, one who will engage in sex with him as long as it does not involve actual penetration. Cesar initially agrees to her terms, but after one too many refusals, Cesar takes what he assumes he as a man has a right to—his girlfriend's vagina. In no way does Hijuelos' text suggest that Cesar's act is justified; the pain and shame it causes his girlfriend is made utterly clear, and Cesar's betrayal brings the relationship to an abrupt and shattering end. But at the same time, Hijuelos' book-long re-creation of the milieu of privileged masculinity in which Cesar was raised and lived, a masculinity which Cesar constantly needs to assert in order to push back against the indignities and degradations of a Hispanic immigrant's life, made me as a reader understand why such a man could commit such a heinous act. Mambo Kings made me feel a deep sympathy for Cesar, even while I condemned what he had done.

The memory of this reading experience came rushing back to me after I finished Patricia Gaffney's first Wyckerly novel, To Love and To Cherish. A reader of this blog had recommended the book to me, although by the time I got around to reading it, I couldn't quite remember why. At first I thought it had been in response to my post about virgin heroes; To Love's hero, Christy Morrell, is a small-town vicar who had obviously remained chaste, at least since taking his vows. But as I came to the novel's shocking climax, I realized that the recommendation had come from a discussion of historical romance novels in which venereal disease, and rape, played a role.

To Love's heroine, Anne Verlaine, is married to a clearly abusive man. For most of the novel, her husband, Geoffrey, is away at war, and Anne actually believes him dead when she begins an impassioned sexual relationship with Christy. As Anne gradually comes to reveal the secrets of her broken marriage, we learn that Geoffrey's recurrent bouts of illness are not in fact caused by malaria, as he has told everyone, including Anne, but rather syphilis, which he contracted during his first military stint abroad after marrying Anne. Her husband's doctor kindly warned Anne of the dangers of engaging in sexual relations with her husband, and Anne refuses to do so, always without admitting to Geoffrey that she knows the real reason he falls regularly ill.

As a romance reader, I wasn't at all surprised when the presumed-dead Geoffrey rises from the grave, just as Anne and Christy are about to announce their engagement to his congregation. Nor was I surprised that Geoffrey's discovery of their relationship leads straight to a violent physical and sexual assault on Anne. But I was surprised by my initial sympathetic reaction to Geoffrey's act. Or rather, I was surprised by how much I just took it for granted that I should feel sympathy for Geoffrey. Only after I had finished reading the novel, and the memory of my response to the similar scene in Mambo Kings flashed into my head, did I realize that there was something upsetting about being made to feel what I was feeling for Geoffrey. Comparing the two scenes helped me to understand just what was at stake in my readerly response.

Unlike many romance novelists, who create heroes and heroines with few flaws and villains without any redeeming characteristics, Gaffney does great work in this novel in presenting multi-faceted, nuanced characters. Her heroine, Anne, is hardly without flaw; often angry, feeling both attraction to and frustration with, her clerical suitor, Anne's caustic tongue and complex feelings make for a prickly heroine. And husband Geoffrey isn't simply a cardboard cut-out villain, twirling his mustache as he abuses his wife without care. The bitterness both Geoffrey and Anne feel, towards themselves and each other, is deeply rooted in the disappointments a marriage made in haste can often bring, as well as in their own weaknesses and strengths. Before a reader finds out the cause of Geoffrey's illness, we almost feel sorry for him when he reaches out to Anne, hoping for a rapprochement, or perhaps just a kind touch at the beginning of the novel.

Gaffney makes Geoffrey's weak character painfully clear upon his "miraculous" return; he reveals to Christy that after experiencing the horrors of the Crimean War, he faked amnesia to avoid being sent back to the front. Yet when he discovers that his wife and his best friend have become lovers in his absence, Geoffrey's anguish is painfully clear: the double valence of his cry, "I'll make you like me" (I'll make you care for me? Or I'll infect you with disease?) signaling both Geoffrey's villainy and his human longing for meaningful connection (298). He cries as he rapes her, apologizing all the while, then tries to comfort her after he finally stops, unable to ejaculate. Even rereading the scene while writing this post, I find myself empathizing with Geoffrey's suffering, his fear of dying, his frustration at not being loved.

And perhaps what I am upset about, after all, is not the sympathy Gaffney makes me feel for Geoffrey. For I felt a similar sympathy for Hijuelos' Cesar, too, one that didn't strike me as nearly so problematic. Perhaps what is truly upsetting me about this scene is how Anne responds to it, a response far different from that of Cesar's girlfriend. Even while Geoffrey "mashed her breasts with his hands," Anne stops fighting after he cries "I'll make you love me" (298). She "let him press her thighs apart," almost consenting to her own violation. After he stops, unable to climax, I come to see why: "At least Christy's God would be satisfied now," Anne thinks, "for she'd gotten what she deserved. After all the years of coldness and rejection, Geoffrey's disease and his defilement were to be her punishment. Her just deserts. Everything was gone now, her last hope finished" (299). Though the novel, through Geoffrey, immediately reassures me that Anne cannot catch the pox from him ("I'm not contagious any longer, I've gone— I've gone— beyond that stage"[299]), Anne's self-abnegating response to his sexual violation still makes me feel rather sick. Even while I admire Anne's ability to forgive Geoffrey, to sympathize with his pain, I find myself refusing to agree with Anne that she in any way deserved to be raped.

Does the novel want its readers to agree with Anne? Or does it push us to reject her conclusion? I think it wants us to do the latter; by novel's end, Anne comes to accept "Christy's God," a benevolent, rather than a vengeful, deity. Yet the narrative still forces her to experience rape, and to feel that she deserved it. And it forces us as readers to experience the rape, and her feelings, along with her, before offering her, and us, a happy ending. For me, this feels like too high a price to pay.

What romance novels have made you feel things that seem at odds with your own personal beliefs? And what did you do once you realized it?


Photo credits:
"I need feminism": ThinkBannedThoughts blog

Next time on RNFF

Working Class Feminism: Cara McKenna's After Hours

Rape in Romance, part 2: Rape in 1980s Harlequin romances

In speaking recently to a friend who had had an abortion as a teen in the early 1980s, I heard for the first time that her pregnancy had been the result not of unprotected sex, but of rape by her boyfriend.  "Call the police? And tell them what?" my friend exclaimed when I asked her why she hadn't prosecuted her rapist-boyfriend. "No one had ever heard of date rape back then," she reminded me. "I didn't even think of it as rape myself."

With "Take Back the Night" vigils on college campuses, documentaries about date rape on cable and network news programs, and widespread media outrage whenever a (usually male) public figure makes a sexist remark about rape victims, it's sometimes hard to remember that until quite recently talk about rape could rarely be heard in public.  Reading the first Mills & Boon/Harlequin romances to feature rape not as "aggressive seduction" but as criminal violation gave me a much-needed reminder of just how new our culture's acknowledgement of date/acquaintance rape truly is.

Charlotte Lamb and Daphne Clair were both popular Mills & Boon/Harlequin authors in 1980—Clair had published ten novels, and Lamb more than thirty— when each chose to use the romance form to explore the then-seldom confronted topic of rape and its effect on a woman's subsequent sexual and romantic life. Lamb chose to open Stranger in the Night with a scene depicting the rape her heroine, Clare experiences as "a young eighteen, straight up from the country" (5). Taken by her flatmate to a New Year's party, Clare drinks a bit too much, leaving her susceptible to an attractive man who flatters her and kisses her. Believing herself in love, Clare allows the man to draw her away from the party, where he violently takes her virginity, despite her physical and verbal protests (an act the back cover copy euphemistically terms "sudden and rough lovemaking"). In the aftermath, Clare vows never to allow herself to be "trapped by her own heart" again (23).

Fast forward nine years, and Clare has become a sophisticated, famous actress, not by sleeping her way to the top but by sublimating her entire emotional life into her performances. Between shows, she's vacationing in Nice with her best friend, playwright Macey, reading through his latest script. Though Macey initially hoped for a romantic relationship with Clare, he accepted a platonic one as the price of remaining her friend. Yet as he tries to convince her to take a role in his new play, its clear he still carries a torch for her.

Macey becomes far less willing to restrain his sexual feelings after he witnesses Clare's unprecedented emotional reaction to the nephew of another actress Macey is courting for his play. Readers realize that Luke Murray is the man who raped her, but Clare has never told anyone else about her violation, including her best friend. "I'd care like hell. I don't want people knowing, staring, smiling," Clare thinks when the perceptive Macey asks her what's wrong (70). In particular, she doesn't want Macey to know: "He would look at her quite differently; she knew that. Macey had an image of her, and she didn't want that image shattered" (71).

Clare can't tell Macey of her rape because she, like society, doesn't know any better than to blame herself for it: "He was bound to despise her when he knew how she had let Luke Murry take her that night. Clare knew Macey well enough to know how he looked at the sort of girl who got drunk at parties and went to bed with strangers" (77-78). Later, when Macey asks her why she never told anyone about what had happened to her, she responds, "Rape? How many people would believe me? I went with him of my own accord. And to do him justice, I suppose he thought I was willing, too. He thought I knew what he wanted. How was he to guess I was as thick as a plank?" (112-13). Women are raped, the novel seems to suggest, because of their own stupid behavior, not because rape is wrong.

In his jealousy, Macey becomes almost as physically and verbally abusive to Clare as her rapist was. A reader might expect that telling Macey her secret will mitigate this problem. But Clare tells Macey in the middle of the novel, not at its end, and his obnoxious behavior only continues. The real difficulty comes when Clare's revelation reawakens her long-repressed sexuality, and she begins to reciprocate Macey's attraction. But even though he desires her, Macey doesn't want Clare to use him just to satisfy a passing sexual urge, and his sexual frustration only increases.

Unfortunately, he doesn't tell her this until after he's already in the midst of a sexual encounter he initiates (although he, like her rapist, attributes his loss of sexual control to her, not himself). He blames her for his own frustrations,  calling her "a stupid little bitch," and a "tease," the same words Luke Murry uttered when she resisted his sexual advances nine years earlier. At the novel's climax, when Macey threatens yet again to "do something we'll both regret," i.e., force her into sex, her reaction is not "stop acting like a rapist," but instead "I love you" (183). With the traditional Harlequin construct that insists the hero prove his love by losing sexual control, it becomes distressingly difficult to differentiate lover from rapist.

Structurally, Daphne Clair's The Loving Trap takes the opposite approach. The novel begins in the present, not the past; both the hero and the reader are kept in the dark about just what happened to heroine Kyla to make her so skittish about sex. The back cover copy makes no mention of rape, either, framing the problem between Kyla and new husband as the "reluctance to commit herself that she still felt, despite her love for Marc." Clair drops myriad hints about Kyla's past, hints that a 21st-century reader would surely pick up on: Kyla dislikes  "big, aggressive men" like Marc, who, like most Harlequin heroes, is a wealthy, self-assured professional (11); she dates Chris, whose "very lack of masculine attraction was the chief quality that had attracted her to him" (25); she feels "panic shot through with sudden pleasure" when Marc kisses her (65). Would it take the 1980 reader far longer? Perhaps when she grows angry at the way Marc takes his own power for granted: "It must be lovely for you to shift us all of us little pawns around the way you do. And it's all done with kindness, too. Everyone benefits, don't they? We're all much better off than before" (65)? Or when Kyla faints when Marc's kiss becomes blatantly sexual? When she refuses to have sex with him on their honeymoon? Or when she admits to herself that "quite simply, she resented him and his male power" (124)?

Though Marc, unlike Macey, doesn't get to hear Kyla's story until near the novel's end, he realizes early that he needs to be gentle, that any abrupt, aggressive move will send her flying away. Before their marriage, he approaches her "with infinite slowness, as though afraid of frightening her with a sudden lunge" (43).  In order to win Kyla, Marc must become the opposite of a traditional Harlequin hero; he must restrain his violence, and his passion.

As a result of Marc's go-slow approach, Kyla begins to feel sexual passion for the first time: "She hadn't thought she could ever feel like that about a man. In a way, she felt an odd, detached relief, that it was possible, after all, that her body was capable of reacting in that way, because the men she had been fond of in the past had never been able to touch any core of pleasure or passion" (70). She even startles herself by thinking "It was high time she stopped being afraid of life and began to reach for what it had to offer" (105). Reach she does, for when Marc offers marriage, she agrees.

Kyla, like Clare, fears telling the man she loves about what happened to her. Not, thankfully, because she thinks she's at fault for her rape; Clair's novel is remarkable for the lack of self-shame it inflicts on its heroine. Kyla was even brave enough to tell the authorities, and to testify against her attackers. Kyla is reluctant to tell Marc because in the past, she told two other men she dated, with disastrous results: one pulled away, the other took a prurient interest.

Yet despite her love for Marc, Kyla cannot control her body's rejection whenever their physical contact moves beyond kissing. Marc becomes increasingly impatient, veering between restraint and force, lover and rapist: "I'm not going to apologize.... You asked for what you got," he tells her after one such aborted encounter (137). After they return from their unconsummated honeymoon, the alpha Harlequin hero/rapist who must force sex upon the woman he loves comes to the fore. Kyla resists, stopping him only by angrily revealing that he won't be the first, that he won't be able to inflict the pain of deflowering on her.

Marc finally realizes what has happened to Kyla, and listens while she tells her story of being raped by a drunken acquaintance and his two friends. Though Marc is disgusted by his behavior toward Kyla, we still have a few more pages to fill out, and so Kyla misinterprets his self-disgust, mistaking it for disgust with her. The two must dance a bit more around their own insecurities before Marc can finally admit that "I should have guessed, of course. The signs were there, if I hadn't been such a blind, arrogant fool.... I'd just damned near raped you myself, and that made me about on a level with them" (184).

In Stranger in the Night, Macey, too, had been dismayed by his own near-rape of Clare after he discovered what had happened to her in the past. Yet he continued to insult her and impose himself sexually on her. In contrast, in The Loving Trap, Marc recognizes the distressing similarities between his actions and those of Kyla's rapists, and quickly changes his behavior.  Only then can Kyla accept Marc as a sexual partner, demonstrating her readiness for sexual intimacy with him by initiating it, rather than simply responding to his advances.

Both novels demonstrate the limited discourses about rape available to women in the early 1980s, even to novelists wishing to portray rape victims with sympathy and understanding. That The Loving Trap proves a far more satisfying read for the feminist reader than Stranger in the Night also shows that significant differences can and do exist between category romances, especially those depicting social issues in the midst of a paradigm shift.

Next time on RNFF: 

The girl as romantic stalker in Sharon G. Flake's Pinned

Rape in romance

Over the last few weeks, I've been researching and writing entries for The Encyclopedia of Romance, to be published by Greenwood/ABC-CLIO. Writers got to choose the entries they wished to work on, and my list is pretty eclectic, including topics from "Samuel Richardson" to "YA romance." The most unusual topic I selected, and the one furthest from my past research interests, must be the topic "rape in romance." But ever since my adolescent reading of Harlequin and 70s historical romances, I've been both fascinated and horrified by the "forced seduction"/rape trope, and was eager to explore where and why romance novels draw the line between seduction and rape.

I discovered far more information than I was able to include in the brief 1000-word entry for the EofR, of course. I'd like to share some of it with you here in upcoming weeks in a variety of posts. The first topic I want to tackle is the surprising (at least to me) fact that in real life, many women have erotic fantasies about being raped.

In 2008, psychologists Joseph W. Critelli and Jenny M. Bivona of the University of North Texas undertook a meta-study*, searching for and analyzing previous scientific studies that had attempted to account for the "psychological enigma" of erotic rape fantasy (57). Though most women (99% in one study) do not want to be raped in reality, many do fantasize about it, and find such fantasies sexually stimulating. The statistics from twenty scientific studies (dating from 1974 to 2006) suggest that such fantasies are not rare, isolated incidents; between 31% to 57% of women surveyed reported experiencing erotic fantasies described as "rape" or "overpowered or forced" to engage in sex. Though rape fantasies were not the most common type of fantasy reported, the theme did show a median ranking in the top ten (of five to 34 topics, depending on the study). For women who did report fantasizing about rape, the theme was cited in the top 3 of the most frequently experienced fantasies. Fascinatingly, though one might expect the prevalence of rape fantasies to have changed over time, just as awareness of rape and depictions of rape in film, television, and fiction have changed, the prevalence of rape fantasies appear to have been relatively stable over the last four decades (61).

Why would women fantasize about being sexually violated, and be sexually turned on by such fantasies? Critelli and Bivona describe eight possible explanations previous scientists have theorized, and comment upon the likelihood of each:

1. Women are Masochists

Must be a girl snake...

The first theory,  posited in the 1940's, argues that women are inherently masochistic. Later studies have shown that while some women who fantasize about rape do enjoy the masochistic elements of such fantasies, the percentage is quite small, is true of men as well as of women, and is not usually considered pathological. Most scientists discount this clearly sexist explanation.

2. Avoiding the Blame

The most frequently cited explanation for rape fantasies is that they are a way to avoid blame. In societies that frown upon female sexuality, women might fantasize about rape in order to experience sexual feelings without having to take responsibility for them, or be blamed for them. I remember reading this explanation in Nancy Friday's books about women's sexual fantasies (My Secret Garden, 1973; Forbidden Flowers, 1975). The evidence to support this theory is decidedly mixed, leading Critelli and Bivona to suggest that explanation might be true for women with "high sex guilt," but not for the population in general.

3. We Love Sex, All Sex

By the late 1980s and 1990s, the discourse about rape fantasy had begun to shift, with several researchers suggesting that rape fantasies reflected a relative openness to and acceptance of sexual experience. As women have more sexual experiences, the diversity of their fantasies increases, research shows. But researchers have not be able to explain the most paradoxical aspect of  rape fantasy: why should women who would not find being sexually violated in real life find fantasies about the experience erotically pleasurable?

4. Do You Really Want (to hurt) Me?

 

Another psychosocial explanation researchers have set forth is one that should be familiar to readers of Old Skool romance: rape (or "forced seduction") occurs because a woman is "so attractive, seductive, and desirable that the man loses control, breaking core expectations of civil decency in order to have her" (64). In other words, I'm so powerful that I make you want me/rape me. Critelli and Bivona argue that there are other themes that address the issue of desirability equally, or perhaps even more directly, than rape fantasies do, and suggest that further study should be done to test this theory.

5. My Enemy, My Lover

Another possible explanation also stems from the romance novel, or of critics' interpretation of it. Helen Hazen's Endless Rapture (1983) argues that for a romance novel's heroine, the challenge is to overcome an apparently evil man, "conquer his heart, seduce him into falling in love with her, have him voluntarily make a lifetime commitment to her, and transform his apparent evil and cruelty into something more socially acceptable without diminishing his masculinity" (Critelli and Bivona 67). In such novels, rape is used as a tool to create "excitement and dramatic tension." No one has asked women who fantasize about rape, though, whether their fantasies include the transformation of their rapists, so again this explanation lacks credible supporting evidence.

6.  Brainwashed by Rape Culture

In her influential 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Susan Brownmiller argued that women's rape fantasies were the pathological result of living in a male-dominated culture, in which women are the objects for the dominant male's desire. Several interesting findings seem to invalidate such a conclusion. First, women who claim feminist identities are just as likely to have fantasies of forced sex as other women. Second, men do not fantasize about raping women nearly as often as women fantasize about being raped. Finally, many men (between 10-20%) also fantasize about being forced into having sex. Critelli and Bivona do concede, however, that American culture is filled with depictions of women as sexual objects of male desire.

7. That Primitive Brain...

The final two theories are not psychosocial, but biological in nature. One suggests that since in many species, the male must put on a show of dominance or pursuit before copulation can take place. Perhaps this predisposition lingers in "primitive brain regions that have evolved to insure successful mating in reptiles, birds, and mammals.... females may have a natural desire to surrender to a selected, dominant male. If so, humans may also have a corresponding tendency to portray this ritual in fantasy," although they have no actual desire to experience rape itself (65). A lot of "perhaps" and "may" in this theory....

8. Scare Me, Turn Me On

Recent scientific studies on "sympathetic activation"—the physical manifestations of the "fight or flight" reaction—show that sympathetic activation can enhance sexual response. If you frighten me, you might also sexually excite me. But you can't scare me too much; while moderate levels of fear can increase pleasure, too much is simply "disruptive" (66). Roller coasters, yes; Freddy Krueger, no.



Critelli and Bivona conclude their article by suggesting that a combination of biological predisposition to surrender fantasies, sympathetic activation, and adversary transformation (7, 8, & 5) provide the most likely general explanation for women's rape fantasies, while blame avoidance, openness to sex, and desirability theories (2, 3, & 4) might best account for a particular woman's attraction to particular types of rape fantasies.


What research would you want scientists to undertake to help explain women's rape fantasies? Can you think of any other explanations for why women would fantasize about rape, and take pleasure from such fantasies? And which of the above explanations do you think best accounts for the prevalence of rape and/or forced seductions in romance novels?


*Published in the Journal of Sex Research 45.1 (2008): 57–70.


Photo/illustration credits:
Journal of Sex Research: Taylor and Francis Group
Tread on Me flag: Althouse
Culture Club record: 45cat 
Roller Coaster: Flaguide.org
  


Next time on RNFF: Battle of the Sexes in the Courtroom: Julie James' Practice Makes Perfect